came through and got my JZI back online, I might be able to get it to Nico.
Ramirez answered,
On the map, the large blotch changed shape while I watched. It was close to where we were. Slowly, part of the shape began to branch out and move.
It began to creep in our direction.
Zoe Ott—Alto Do Mundo
By the time Penny and I got back to the war room, it was the closest thing to chaos I’d ever seen in front of Ai. She sat there, calm, while voices on the video screens and in the room all tried to talk at the same time.
“ …confirmed, it was one of the ICBMs from the defense satellite,” a voice said.
“You get that?” Osterhagen asked.
Ai nodded. “Mr. Vaggot,” she asked, “how long until we regain control of those missiles?”
A window with the man’s face appeared in one corner of Osterhagen’s screen. He looked a little less collected than the last time he’d appeared, but his voice was still strong and confident.
“Not long,” he said. “It’s taking time for the ’bots to chisel through the defenses he set up, but once they do, control will be transferred here through the Stillwell Corps satellite-communications array. I think we can shunt him out in thirty or forty minutes, maybe less.”
“That was a warning shot,” Osterhagen said. “He’s telling us to stand down.”
“A warning shot?” a woman asked, her voice breaking.
“Initial data confirmed all twelve ICBMs were aimed across an even spread of twelve sectors through the city,” he said. “In order for him to drop one out in the bay like that, he’d have to have programmed it with a new target. He intentionally fired it outside the city, where it wouldn’t cause any structural damage, but where we’d see it. It was a warning shot.”
“What about the radiation?” someone asked.
“The explosion created a radioactive cloud of steam and smoke that right now is moving along the shoreline at a distance of ten miles,” Mr. Raphael said. “That could change.”
“The next launch won’t be a warning,” Osterhagen said. “What is the situation at Alto Do Mundo?”
“The detonation of a Leichenesser charge cleared a hole,” someone said. “But he’s streamed in more of them. I’d say we put a weak link in the chain, but it’s reforming.”
Osterhagen looked offscreen for a second, then nodded and cut back in.
“We just got a report that the revivors in the street are being ordered away from the CMC Tower,” he said.
“Why?” Raphael asked. “Moved to where?”
“Outside a five block perimeter around the tower,” Osterhagen said. “We have to assume it’s to protect them, and that it’s a precursor to some kind of strike. Start getting your people out of there.”
“How? We’re surrounded from the ground and the air—”
“Any way you can, Robin!”
“What about the virus?” Ai asked. “Has it been deployed?”
“Yes,” Osterhagen said. “That’s how this information was obtained. Ott was right about Flax. We seeded her revivor matrix and transitioned her onto their network. Fawkes cut her off, but not in time. She received the alert along with the rest to clear the CMC Tower.”
“How long before the virus will take effect?” she asked.
“It should have worked by now,” he said. “It might be taking longer than expected to propagate, but we have to consider the possibility that it failed.”
For the first time that day, I saw something like confusion appear on Ai’s face before it went back to its drugged-out expression.
“Failed how?” she asked. “The tests were successful.”
“Yes,” Osterhagen said. “Assuming the Huma version of Fawkes’s revivors matches the ones we had in custody, then it should have worked. But as of this morning, that version changed. It could have invalidated the virus partially, or even completely.”
“But the virus affects them,” she said. “It reaches them, I’ve seen it.”
I closed my eyes and tried to cut through the anxiousness and pressure that emanated from every consciousness in the room, even those piped through remotely. I took a deep breath and focused on Ai.
She was the elephant in the room; her consciousness hung over her tiny body like a small, broken planet whose pieces were carefully held together by gravity. Tentacles of light stretched out from the fragments and connected to the men and women at the table. More tentacles wove through the room to touch Penny and even me. They floated through the walls, ceiling, and floor, across the city, I figured, to reach Raphael, Osterhagen, and the rest. She was amazingly calm in the face of what was going on, her thoughts ticking away beneath the colors of her mind like the tiny pieces of an incredibly complicated clockwork machine. She was tied into the future model that was displayed on the wall, tuned to the smallest change, and looking for some clue, any clue that might tell her what to do as time ran out.
She didn’t know, though, and that scared me. Underneath it all, she was confused. Things weren’t happening like she expected anymore. With all of her knowledge, she wasn’t sure what to do.
Penny was calm, but was ready to physically act. She spent a lot of time like that, and she almost never relaxed, even when she was drunk, but I’d never felt her so alert before. Part of her mind was turned toward me and I sensed a bond there, a protectiveness I’d never quite noticed before. I’d always known she would kill for me, but somehow I’d never seen the devotion that drove it until that moment.
I reached out, following the connections Ai kept with the others at their remote locations, and found Osterhagen and Raphael. Raphael was worried. He was worried for himself and us, but mostly he was worried for the people on the ground; he was afraid for them, and not just our people but the innocent bystanders about to be caught in Fawkes’s attack. Osterhagen was angry and frustrated. He was confident he could defeat Fawkes—in fact, he was certain of it—but the nukes had tied his hands, and, yes …there …buried away deep inside, he was scared too.
The people in the room continued to talk in restrained, clipped tones, and as I took the pulse of their thoughts as a whole, I realized that fear had begun to creep into the entire network. It was fear of the unknown. It was the fear that despite all the manipulation and information tracking and careful planning, they were delving into an unknown where they couldn’t see clearly. That scared the hell out of them, all of them.
Even Ai.
There was someone I needed to communicate with. The person who had stood next to me in my vision and the only one in the room I knew would survive along with me if we failed.
Hans Vaggot was isolated, and I could tell that although Ai was watching him, she wouldn’t touch him. He was being left alone to retake the satellite, and as soon as I entered his mind, I knew he was getting close. There was a relief there, like a cool undercurrent beneath the hot colors of his mind. He’d recently made some kind of breakthrough and was closing in. I couldn’t tell how long it would be, but although he was still focused like a laser, I could sense his hope—he knew he would succeed; he was only worried about the timing. If he knew it and I knew it, then at least Ai and Osterhagen knew it too. Despite their misgivings, they had begun to think that in spite of everything, they still might stop the event from happening.
Except they were wrong.
